A Time to Laugh

I’m so thankful. Can you believe it?

Statement about Race at Bob Jones University
At Bob Jones University, Scripture is our final authority for faith and practice and it is our intent to have it govern all of our policies. It teaches that God created the human race as one race. History, reality and Scripture affirm that in that act of creation was the potential for great diversity, manifested today by the remarkable racial and cultural diversity of humanity. Scripture also teaches that this beautiful, God-caused and sustained diversity is divinely intended to incline mankind to seek the Lord and depend on Him for salvation from sin (Acts 17:24–28).

The true unity of humanity is found only through faith in Christ alone for salvation from sin—in contrast to the superficial unity found in humanistic philosophies or political points of view. For those made new in Christ, all sinful social, cultural and racial barriers are erased (Colossians 3:11), allowing the beauty of redeemed human unity in diversity to be demonstrated through the Church.

The Christian is set free by Christ’s redeeming grace to love God fully and to love his neighbor as himself, regardless of his neighbor’s race or culture. As believers, we demonstrate our love for others first by presenting Christ our Great Savior to every person, irrespective of race, culture, or national origin. This we do in obedience to Christ’s final command to proclaim the Gospel to all men (Matthew 28:19–20). As believers we are also committed to demonstrating the love of Christ daily in our relationships with others, disregarding the economic, cultural and racial divisions invented by sinful humanity (Luke 10:25–37; James 2:1–13).

Bob Jones University has existed since 1927 as a private Christian institution of higher learning for the purpose of helping young men and women cultivate a biblical worldview, represent Christ and His Gospel to others, and glorify God in every dimension of life.

BJU’s history has been chiefly characterized by striving to achieve those goals; but like any human institution, we have failures as well. For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it.

In so doing, we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.

On national television in March 2000, Bob Jones III, who was the university’s president until 2005, stated that BJU was wrong in not admitting African-American students before 1971, which sadly was a common practice of both public and private universities in the years prior to that time. On the same program, he announced the lifting of the University’s policy against interracial dating.

Our sincere desire is to exhibit a truly Christlike spirit and biblical position in these areas. Today, Bob Jones University enrolls students from all 50 states and nearly 50 countries, representing various ethnicities and cultures. The University solicits financial support for two scholarship funds for minority applicants, and the administration is committed to maintaining on the campus the racial and cultural diversity and harmony characteristic of the true Church of Jesus Christ throughout the world.

Thots?

Destroying Your Life From Within

1-3 And a final word to you arrogant rich: Take some lessons in lament. You’ll need buckets for the tears when the crash comes upon you. Your money is corrupt and your fine clothes stink. Your greedy luxuries are a cancer in your gut, destroying your life from within. You thought you were piling up wealth. What you’ve piled up is judgment.

4-6 All the workers you’ve exploited and cheated cry out for judgment. The groans of the workers you used and abused are a roar in the ears of the Master Avenger. You’ve looted the earth and lived it up. But all you’ll have to show for it is a fatter than usual corpse. In fact, what you’ve done is condemn and murder perfectly good persons, who stand there and take it.

7-8 Meanwhile, friends, wait patiently for the Master’s Arrival. You see farmers do this all the time, waiting for their valuable crops to mature, patiently letting the rain do its slow but sure work. Be patient like that. Stay steady and strong. The Master could arrive at any time.

9 Friends, don’t complain about each other. A far greater complaint could be lodged against you, you know. The Judge is standing just around the corner.

10-11 Take the old prophets as your mentors. They put up with anything, went through everything, and never once quit, all the time honoring God. What a gift life is to those who stay the course! You’ve heard, of course, of Job’s staying power, and you know how God brought it all together for him at the end. That’s because God cares, cares right down to the last detail.

12 And since you know that he cares, let your language show it. Don’t add words like “I swear to God” to your own words. Don’t show your impatience by concocting oaths to hurry up God. Just say yes or no. Just say what is true. That way, your language can’t be used against you.

Prayer to Be Reckoned With

13-15 Are you hurting? Pray. Do you feel great? Sing. Are you sick? Call the church leaders together to pray and anoint you with oil in the name of the Master. Believing-prayer will heal you, and Jesus will put you on your feet. And if you’ve sinned, you’ll be forgiven—healed inside and out.

16-18 Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with. Elijah, for instance, human just like us, prayed hard that it wouldn’t rain, and it didn’t—not a drop for three and a half years. Then he prayed that it would rain, and it did. The showers came and everything started growing again.

19-20 My dear friends, if you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off. Go after them. Get them back and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God.

James 5

Let him begin by treating patriotism . . . as part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the “cause,” in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce. . . . Once you have made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing.

Screwtape on How to Ruin a Believer’s Faith in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters

I just finished David Kuo’s book Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. In essence, he writes to remind himself and fellow Christians that Faith can never be a means to a political ends. He wants to foil Screwtape’s plan.

Several things struck me. I did notice his keswidispicostalistic soteriology here and there, but that’s not really a big surprise. His story of identifying with an ideology, being dazzled by its powerful sparkle, ignoring obvious ethical dilemmas in favor of power, enduring his own surprising and life-changing personal crisis, and chucking it all (when termination was inevitable anyway) was so familiar. I saw myself in his words.

He worked for the Christian Right in the 1990s-2000s — for Bill Bennett, Ralph Reed, and John Ashcroft. He wrote speeches and created talking points. Eventually, he became a big part of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.”

As a speech writer for the Christian Right and the Republicans, he admits that he propagated flat-out lies about Bill and Hillary Clinton, and he determined to apologize to them personally for that slander. He really didn’t want to, but he knew he should. Then God dropped the opportunity into his lap. It was awkward, halting, and impromptu. Completely uncomfortable. Read:

His apology didn’t make huge, long-lasting political waves. It was just a brief, forgettable sound bite the next day. There were no law suits afterward. But that’s not why Kuo did it. He apologized because it was right, because he was being true to his Faith, and because it was a reminder to him and to those around him about who God is and how much we need Him.

It’s also a way to infuriate Screwtape.

Kuo brings up Bob Jones University several times. My heart sinks every time he does. He describes it as the “ultrafundamentalist” place where “compassionate conservatism” died — where George W. Bush’s catering to the microcultural elements of the Christian Right was more klutzy than “stealthy.” Kuo explains W.’s election strategy: convince Evangelicals that making him President was the only way to advance their social conservatism. “He was born again. He loved Jesus. He hated abortion and loved the family.” But the only way to actually get him into office is by downplaying that religious conservatism.

In other words, W. said to the theo-cons, “Hey, I’m just like you, but I have to play the ‘moderate’ game so that I can get you what you want when I’m in office.” And, according to Kuo, the nation saw that strategy naked and bald at Bob Jones University in February 2000.

It’s chilling to see that event through the eyes of a fellow believer but a BJU-outsider.

The effort at Please-Reconcile.org is coming upon its first milestone. This Wednesday they are sending the letter to the BJU Board and Administration with 400+ signatures of BJU alumni and friends and neighbors imploring the current administration to reconcile their past racist policies. Read the list of signees and their comments. These people are earnest, careful, and prayerful. None of us would be signing if we didn’t care deeply about Bob Jones University’s ministry and its people.

I’ve read the documents at Please-Reconcile.org, and I am stunned and grieved. I’ve said it before — I really had no clue, but that is exactly the problem. Again, I’m sorry.

So if you’ve graduated from, worked for, attended, or been taught by anything Bob Jones University, if you know someone from BJU or if you’ve purchased a book from their Press, if you have ever read about, written about, or heard about that place, if you’ve ever choked on institutional racism, if you’ve ever had to clarify misconceptions about Christ because of BJU’s interracial dating ban, please prayerfully consider signing the letter.

Many theo-cons are working to foreground racial reconciliation as a conservative value in order to heal a very broken GOP. As tempting as it is to emphasize this pragmatic and political reason for reconciling the sin of racism, I can’t forget David Kuo and C. S. Lewis’s admonition. It’s not about the politics. It’s about reminding ourselves that we are each full of sin and that God is faithful in spite of us.

We confess. God takes care of the rest.

If we claim that we’re free of sin, we’re only fooling ourselves. A claim like that is errant nonsense. On the other hand, if we admit our sins—make a clean breast of them—he won’t let us down; he’ll be true to himself. He’ll forgive our sins and purge us of all wrongdoing. If we claim that we’ve never sinned, we out-and-out contradict God—make a liar out of him. A claim like that only shows off our ignorance of God.

I John 1:8-10

So in conclusion, I can’t pass a law. I don’t have the authority without my colleagues in the Congress to apologize to African Americans. But as a person and a citizen of my country, and a US Congressman, I can apologize. I can say to you that I feel very [voice breaks with emotion] inadequate to stand up here and say that. I don’t have the words. I haven’t experienced the suffering. I feel it in my bones that it’s right. I’m very sorry for what’s happened. I hope that you’ll forgive me because it’s easy to pray, “Well, it’s those other people that did it.” No, I’m part of it, too. Forgive me. Forgive me for my sins. Forgive me for my ancestors, and [Applause] . . . This is just a start. It’s not the end. It’s the beginning. And maybe God, hopefully God, will take this conference, take these apologies and start to heal, start to close this wound that’s there. Amen.

Tony Hall

About a week ago, I found a description of life at BJU written by a former student–a well-liked, bright, Who’s-Who kind of student who just happened to be a person of Color. Just happened to be, right? It didn’t matter anymore that his ethnic makeup was more diverse than mine. BJU dropped that horrible racist rule forbidding interracial dating during Campaign 2000, right? The rule was a relic of an ugly, by-gone age, right? . . . RIGHT??

That’s how I’d distance myself from the racism around me: it’s not me who’s racist–it’s them–and BOY! are they racist!! I did that over and over for years.

What I’m about to say is not unique to me in any way. This is just how well-intentioned, but willfully blind whites live knee-deep in the ideological muck of racism.

Let me give you a very recent example that proves my point. Just about a year ago, a colleague entered my office and said about a student, “Well, I knew he was . . . well, BLACK.” She spat out the word reluctantly but still pregnant with prejudice. He had wanted to perform a Langston Hughes poem, but she refused to allow it because Hughes was a . . . Communist (yeah, that’s the reason! [/sarcasm]) and actually suggested–and I kid you not–a Robert E. Lee tribute. I was just a computer guru for her, a hack who could change the database entry. But as I clattered and clicked away, I heard her ever-so-politely articulate that very old and very Southern prejudice.

It was too easy for me to sit there agape and think, “That’s her problem. Not mine. Oh my, I can’t believe she’s saying that.” I rubbed my temples after she left as if to cleanse my mind from what I had heard.

Some time in the mix the student who had wanted to use Langston Hughes’ words to express his own voice told me about his own hurt. I ached. I empathized as best I could. I was sorry. And while I did speak out in the departmental meeting and said, “We came off looking like jerks in that situation!” I was still in it. Was there much difference between my sitting in the middle of that and Phil Yancey buying Lester Maddox souvenirs?

As much as I’d like to pass the guilt off on another person, the ideology was wrong. And I participated–perhaps unwittingly ignorant or perhaps willfully ignorant.

So when I found another student’s online description of what went on at Bob Jones University just months before (and after) the lifting of the inter-racial dating rule during Campaign 2000, I was appalled. I knew that BJU had roots in a broken ideology of the antebellum South, but I really didn’t know.

Maybe I didn’t want to know. Maybe I was too committed to “the cause” of a particular expression of Christian education that I shrugged off the problems. Maybe that’s just too easy to do because I’m white.

But I must say now–to all my former and future students, my friends, my neighbors, and the Body of Christ at large–I’m sorry. I’m sorry for my willfully blind participation in a racist ideology. In order to make amends, let me tell you what I best remember about my interactions with racism at BJU since 1986:

• I heard my first Southern roommate talk about “them” while my mouth hung silently open and my eyes widened. Are you kidding me? You believe that?!!
• I listened to my Southern classmate’s public speech arguing for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ignoble connections to Marxism. I did object in writing on the student response sheet.
• I heard another classmate assert that African-Americans should go into the military because “well. . . . they are good at following orders.” I pretty loudly objected after being disappointed in my earlier silence.
• I hung my head in shame as I saw a small group of my classmates, a few years my senior, actually mourn the national celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday by donning black arm bands. They thought it was pretty funny.
• During that first semester as a graduate assistant while lecturing on avoiding sexist and racist speech, I scolded my student, a prominent administrator’s son, who stopped me in the middle of my talk and proudly declared that “blacks were made to be our servants.” The class did audibly gasp in horror, and I said with my brow furrowed, “You have no logical or statistical or biblical proof for that statement!” Then the bell rang, interrupting us. I took action with my supervisor who wrote the boy’s father. “That kind of talk is okay in South Georgia,” the father, an administrator, explained to his son, “but you can’t talk like that around here.”
• I ached when a dear friend of mixed ethnic heritage described her “viewing” before two administrators so they could decide if she was white or asian. They chose white for her.
• As a full-time faculty member, I refused to allow a faculty child to speak on the glorious benefits of slavery for an upper-level speech class. I offered no explanation. I just said emphatically, “Uh. . . no!”
• I rolled my eyes at Dr. Bob Jones, III speaking in faculty meeting about the interracial dating rule, stating, “If you don’t agree with this rule, then leave.” No one I knew actually agreed with it. But no one left either.
• I took a leave of absence in 1996 from BJU to study rhetoric at Indiana University. I took the mandatory diversity training required for all Associate Instructors, and I enjoyed it. I learned a lot. I still don’t understand the controversy around these sorts of requirements.
• I took the African-American rhetoric class in my department and even wrote an award-winning paper on Malcolm X. The biggest thing I learned from my white professors (albeit published and respected scholars in African-American rhetoric) was that as a white woman I didn’t get it. I could never really get what it was like to grow up black in America. I do understand that I don’t understand.
• I cringed when John McCain made a spectacle out of BJU’s racist policy. I had been praying quietly for BJU to change that horrible rule. It was a blight. BJU deserved the rebuke, but McCain seemed like nothing more than a rank opportunist.
• I listened to Dr. Bob Jones, III, then-president of BJU drop the interracial rule on Larry King Live on March 3, 2000. I’ll never forget that day. I was enduring my first (of four) pregnancy losses. I was at the hospital in Bloomington for a D&C, and all around me I saw people poring over the USA Today article and the cable news channels were blathering on and on. The receptionist called me to the front for my insurance card, and she looked at it and loudly said with amazement and disgust, “BOB JONES UNIVERSITY?” I felt the room glare at me. I said a quiet “yes.” For the first time in my life, I was very ashamed of my alma mater and employer.
• That night when Dr. Bob announced the elimination of the rule, I was too relieved to hear the liberties he was taking with the truth. The rule was no big deal? Meh — that’s just ’cause he’s clueless up there in his Ivory Tower. One-world-ism? Are you kidding me? I’ve never heard that one before. The rule was never preached or taught? Not hardly. . . .
• Dr. Bob said about the interracial dating rule: “Students never hear it preached. There have been four, five, six generations of students that graduated from there have never heard this preached in our chapel or taught in our school.” That wasn’t true, and Joel points that out. Just a few months before March, 2000, students were expelled from BJU for “interracial dating.” Students of Color heard for themselves in their Bible classes–before and after 2000–that they personally were cursed descendants of Ham.
• Upon returning to BJU, I planned a tribute to Black History month in my curriculum. I determined that every Rhetoric and Public Address major would have some exposure to Malcolm X and understand that his version of separatism was not much different from theirs. Like my diminutive additions could counteract the racist hermeneutic elsewhere. I don’t know. Maybe it could help.
• I put Marcus Garvey and Eldridge Cleaver and Toni Morrison on my office shelves–right next to Cixous and Steinem, Nietzsche and Foucault, of course. And Billy Graham and Jonathan Edwards, too.
• I wrote my dissertation. That final chapter was about Campaign 2000 and the fallout before and after. I relished the rhetorical opportunities available to be inside the camp and still be critical about the rhetoric around lifting of the ban. I took Dr. Bob at his word when he said that the Board wanted to eliminate the rule in May 1999.
• In discussing the lifting of the rule, I said in my dissertation: “The Associated Press reported the next week that the rule was only partially lifted: students now needed parental permission to date outside their ‘race,’ the report said. But the story was incorrect. As of March 3, 2000, no prohibitions on interracial dating whatsoever exist at Bob Jones University despite continuous media reporting to the contrary.” I know now that that’s simply incorrect. If you look at the footnotes of the book, you see that I had a brief email conversation with the Assistant Dean of Men at the time (I was at IU). I asked him if students had to get parental permission to date “outside their race.” If this was true, then the rule hadn’t ostensibly been lifted at all; another layer of bureaucracy had just been added to the enforcement. The Assistant Dean of Men simply told me that “No, they don’t need parental permission.” I should have probed deeper. I now know that Dr. Bob III did make an announcement in chapel on Monday, March 6 stating the parental permission stipulation only to rescind it on March 7th.
• I also said in my dissertation/book: “Reverend Calvin Butts, pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, does not believe that ‘Bob Jones has had a change of heart. I think that perhaps Bob Jones has had a change of mind.’ The difference between ‘heart’ and ‘mind’ is lost in this civic context.” I honestly didn’t understand what Reverend Butts was trying to say. Now I do.
• I continued: “Maxine Waters, prominent Democratic Representative from California is ’suspicious when a change comes under this kind of pressure. I would not rush too fast to believe that we have reached a new milestone here.’ Dramatic, albeit tardy, changes in policy are ignored.” I concluded that timing was the problem in BJU’s rule change. I now better see Waters’ point. It wasn’t timing alone that was the problem. It was substance. No repentance had been made.
• When our daughter Elise was born still, I asked that in lieu of flowers donations be given in her memory to the BJU Minority Scholarship Fund. I think upwards of $600 were given. The doctor that delivered her was on the board governing those funds.
• In talking with God on the Quad author, Naomi Schaefer Riley, I explained that the interracial dating rule was nearly impossible to enforce. What is race after all? And so what the administration did was stretch the boundaries of “white” as far as they could logically go. As if everyone really wanted to be white.

I now know better after reading my former student’s account. It wasn’t just “white” or “race” that was ambiguous. It’s the word “dating.” “Marriage” is plain and clear, but what’s a date? Sharing a meal with friends? A conversation? A serendipitous meeting on the sidewalk? A glance across the room? Sitting two or three down from a person? Who knows?

I now know that what had happened since the Supreme Court loss was that the rule went underground, more unspoken and hidden behind closed administrative doors. “The principle” behind the rule was revised as “one-world-ism” when it was nothing more than a sinister fear of miscegenation.

I say that because of documents that have recently been made available online. The Nation article when Dr. Bob III states that “a Negro is best when he serves at the table.” Letters that prove that a large church was pushed out of the BJU orbit because it welcomed an interracially married couple into membership. Testimonies from fundamental African-Americans who were harshly treated when they so gently pointed out the sin of racism in BJU.

There are many things about BJU’s religious House of Cards for which I could apologize. But I don’t know of any more foul than the trenchant racism. The philosophical-theological-political mess I’ll leave to discuss in another post. For years I’ve wanted to bellow an apology to every person of color I’ve met. For now, I’ll just say this: I was so concerned to cling to a pristine image that I ignored the disease growing right next to me. It’s like a woman who paints over the melanoma on her face. She can’t see it, but everyone else can. And, if she ignores it, it’ll kill her. Her doctor may say, “You have a ton of these cancerous blotches, but we have to start with the worst one.”

I can’t do much. I really can’t. I’m not rich or powerful. I’m a stay-at-home-mom with a blog. I can’t pass a law. I have little influence–less influence even than Senator Tony Hall. But the very least thing I can do is repent. I know that the vast majority of my former “co-laborers” at BJU feel the exact same way I do, but they are too deep in the ideology to form the words of an apology.

So again, I am sorry.

Awhile back I read Phil Yancey’s first chapter in Soul Survivor. I was floored. The world he described was so alien to me. I grew up in Detroit, and he grew up in Atlanta. Racism in Detroit is more unspoken — an undertow of white fear and flight keeps the civic tension just below a simmer. Racism in Atlanta in the middle of the last century was unashamedly overt and outspoken. Yancey was raised hearing that the “dark races” were the result of God’s curse. In his native Georgia the gas stations all had three bathrooms for white men, white women, and colored. The museums set aside one day a week for “coloreds” to attend. Yancey remembers buying a Lester Maddox “Junior” size souvenir pickax handle similar to the ones that policemen used on demonstrators. He witnessed the KKK parades.

I, of course, had read those descriptions before. My parents had even mentioned to me how startled they were by the segregation when they drove through Georgia on their honeymoon in the 50s. White Northerners really have no idea. We’re kind of dumb like that. And we can move easily between our white world in Detroit and South Carolina–even if we do have a ’ski’ at the end of our names–and the only culture shock we feel is the sweetness of the tea we’re served or the quaintness of the drawl we hear.

But that was a long time ago, I always reasoned. That kind of racism is for old people or stupid people, right? That’s for people who are absolutely not like me, right? . . . RIGHT??

That’s why Yancey’s account still sends chills down my spine. He grew up a “New Testament, Blood-bought, Born-again, Premillenial, Dispensational, fundamental” Protestant just like me. He attended some unnamed Bible college in South Carolina that forbid interracial dating and marriage. Scratching my head, I searched my employer’s records for Yancey’s name–without success. Was he talking about BJU?

Connecting the dots wasn’t that hard. Whether or not Yancey attended BJU wasn’t the point. This was the South and the so-called religion that created BJU. I couldn’t distance myself from it any further. This was the ideology that bore the system in which I lived, worked, ministered, and was raising my family.

Read Yancey for yourself.

When I visited Mendenhall in 1974, a sign welcomed me to town: “White people unite, defeat Jew/Communist race mixers.” I asked John Perkins [Yancey's African-American friend] to show me an example of racism in action. “When I write your story, people are going to tell me everything has changed,” I said. “The civil rights bill was ten years ago. Is there still overt discrimination?”

Perkins thought for a minute and suddenly his face brightened: “I know — let’s integrate the Revolving Table restaurant!” We drove to an elegant restaurant famous for its mechanized Lazy Susan, which slowly revolves in the center of a huge table, bearing platters of blackeyed peas, squash, cabbage, sweet potatoes, chicken and dumplings, and other Southern favorites. When we sat down, the white diners all glared at us and then, as if at a prearranged signal, got up and moved away to smaller tables. Except for Perkins and me, no one in the restaurant spoke for the next hour. I ate uneasily, glancing over my shoulder, expecting a nightstick. When I paid the bill and commented on the delicious food, the hostess took my money without responding or even looking me in the eye. I had the tiniest glimpse of the hostility Perkins had lived with all his life.

Two months later, when I published my article on John Perkins, the Mississippi branch of the Christian organization I worked for passed a resolution demanding that I be fired for stirring up bad memories. “Things have changed now,” they said. “Why dig up the past?”

Why indeed? Almost three decades have passed since my Missisisippi visit, and the great civil rights victories are nearing the half¬century milestone. We live in a new century now, a new millennium even, and much has indeed changed. Nowadays, black patrons in Mississippi can eat wherever they want, drink from any water fountain, sleep in any motel. The victories that Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evans, Bob Moses, John Perkins, and many others fought for were won — legally, at least — although they waited a full century after the Emancipation Proclamation. Progressive Southerners from Georgia, Arkansas, and Texas have served as president. Black visitors can attend white churches at will, though they seldom want to. All these dreams seemed unattainable to Martin Luther King, Jr., just four decades ago. As a token of the momentous changes, the nation now pauses each year to honor King himself, object of so much controversy during his lifetime, on a national holiday. He is the only African-American, the only minister, and indeed the only individual American so honored.

The victories did not come easily, and most did not come at all during his lifetime. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, an uneasy rival of Dr. King, kidded him in 1963 that his methods had not achieved a single victory for integration in Albany or Birmingham. “In fact, Martin, if you have desegregated anything by your efforts, kindly enlighten me.”

“Well,” King replied, “I guess about the only thing I’ve desegregated so far is a few human hearts.” He knew that the ultimate victory must be won there. Laws could prevent white people from lynching blacks, but no law could require races to forgive or love one another. The human heart, not the courtroom, was his supreme battleground. As one of those changed hearts, I would have to agree.

King had developed a sophisticated strategy of war fought with grace, not guns. He countered violence with nonviolence and hatred with love. King’s associate Andrew Young remembers those turbulent days as a time when they sought to save “black men’s bodies and white men’s souls.” Their real goal, King said, was not to defeat the white man but “to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor and challenge his false sense of superiority…. The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.” And that is what Martin Luther King, Jr., finally set into motion, even in born racists like me.

Despite the moral and social fallout from racism, somehow the nation did stay together, and people of all colors eventually joined the democratic process in America, even in the South. For some years now, Atlanta has elected African-American mayors, including civil rights leader Andrew Young. Even Selma, Alabama, has a black mayor, who in the year 2000 defeated the mayor who had held office since the notorious march. And old “Segregation forever!” George Wallace appeared in his wheelchair before the black leadership of Alabama to apologize for his past behavior, an apology he repeated on statewide television. When Wallace went on to apologize to the Baptist church in Montgomery where King had launched the movement, the leaders who came to offer him forgiveness included Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson, and the brother of the murdered Medgar Evers.

In 1995 the Southern Baptist Convention, 150 years after forming over the issue of slavery, formally repented of their long-term support of racism. (A pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church responded, “Finally we have a response to Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham City jail’ in 1963. Too bad it’s thirty-two years too late.”)

Even the large Baptist church I attended in my childhood learned to repent. When I attended a service several years ago, I was shocked to find only a few hundred worshipers scattered in the large sanctuary that, in my childhood, used to be packed with 1,500. The church seemed cursed. Finally the pastor, a classmate of mine from childhood, took the unusual step of scheduling a service of repentance. In advance of the service he wrote to Tony Evans and to the shunned Bible professor, asking their forgiveness. Then publicly, painfully, with African-American leaders present. he recounted the sin of racism as it had been practiced by the church in the past. He repented, and received their forgiveness. Although a burden seemed to lift from the congregation after that service, it was not sufficient to save the church. A few years later the white congregation moved out to the suburbs, and today a rousing African-American Congregation, the Wings of Faith, fills the building and rattles its windows once more.

Observers of the South sometimes speak of it as “Christ-haunted.’ Perhaps they should speak of it as “race-haunted” as well. All of us, white or black, who grew up in those days bear scars. Some black people, like John Perkins and Bob Moses, bear physical scars. We whites bear spiritual scars. Although I have not lived in the South for thirty years, I live with its memories, like the medieval murderers who were forced to wear the corpses of their victims strapped to their backs. The entire nation bears scars. Who would suggest that we have achieved anything like “the beloved community” King longed for?

I have visited King’s old church in Atlanta, Ebenezer Baptist, and sat in tears as I saw through new eyes the moral center of the black community that gave them strength to fight against bigots like me. I was on the outside in those days, cracking jokes, spreading rumors, helping sustain a system of evil. Inside the church, and for a time only inside the church, the black Community stood tall. My eyes, blinded by bigotry, could not see the Kingdom of God at work.

A few years before his death, King was asked about mistakes he had made. He replied, “Well, the most pervasive mistake I have made was in believing that because our cause was just, we could be sure that the white ministers of the South, once their Christian consciences were challenged, would rise to our aid. I felt that white ministers would take our Cause to the white power structures. I ended up, of course, chastened and disillusioned. As our movement unfolded, and direct appeals were made to white ministers, most folded their hands–and some even took stands against us. . . .

Only one thing haunts me more than the sins of my past: What sins am I blind to today? It took the greatness of Martin Luther King, Jr., to awaken the conscience of a nation in the last century. What keeps us in this new century from realizing the beloved community of justice, peace, and love for which King fought and died? On the wrong side of what issues does the church stubbornly plant its feet today? As King used to say, the presence of injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

Occasionally, grace and power descend on great and flawed leaders to convict and lead us on. In the end, it was not King’s humanitarianism that got through to me, nor his Ghandian example of nonviolent resistance, nor his personal sacrifices, inspiring as those may be. It was his grounding in the Christian gospel that finally made me conscious of the beam in my eye and forced me to attend to the message he was proclaiming. Because he kept quoting Jesus, eventually I had to listen. The church may not always get it right–and it may take centuries or even millennia for its eyes to open–but when it does, God’s own love and forgiveness flow down like a stream of living water.